VOLLENHOVEN, DIRK HENDRIK THEODOOR

D. H. T. Vollenhoven (1892–1978), a Dutch Calvinist philosopher, theologian and mathematician, pioneered, together with his brother- in-law Herman *Dooyeweerd, the philosophical tradition once called ‘cosmonomic philosophy’, now referred to as Reformational thought. Both started to work on this project well before their appointment to the Free University in Amsterdam in 1926.

Vollenhoven started his career as a pastor. He articulated most of his systematic philosophical conceptualizations in a short summary known as Isagogie or Introduction, written primarily because he taught introductory philosophy to all incoming students. His appointment was focused in history of philosophy, and that work gave him the reputation of devoting his career to a systematization of the history of philosophy as a network of interrelated ontologies, cosmologies and anthropologies. Each philosopher was primarily understood in terms of a type of ontology and then distinguished from others who shared that ontology by the spirit of the time in which the ontology was worked out. This spirit of the time Vollenhoven characterized as the prevailing religious orientation of the philosopher to whatever essentially determined the fundamental nature of all reality. By following types as constancies through time, and prevailing spirits as successive periods, he constructed a table of a rich historical variety of interrelated philosophical conceptions that differs markedly from the division of historical philosophies into materialist or idealist, rationalist or empiricist, and other overly simple divisions.

Vollenhoven was known for his irenic spirit and his exemplary piety. These traits induced him to stop working on certain developments in Reformational thought that potentially conflicted with the views of the then dominant Reformed theology. For most of his life he was chair of the Association for Calvinistic Philosophy. As a Reformational philosopher he differed from Dooyeweerd on important points, published after the death of both in the Report on Divergencies. Perhaps most important was their difference concerning God’s law as it determined creation. Vollenhoven placed more stress on that law as law of love, and less on law as order of creation. Hence, contrary to Dooyeweerd, he had room for an evolving universe because the order of things was not already fixed before things came to be.

Three North American philosophers received their PhD degrees under Vollenhoven and also continued his work, viz. H. Evan Runner, Calvin G. Seerveld and Hendrik Hart. Seerveld in particular made creative use of the historical method developed by his teacher. Other philosophers who continued his work are James Olthuis, Robert Sweetman and John Kok.

Bibliography

D. H. T. Vollenhoven, Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy (Amsterdam, 1933); History of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Franeker, 1950); Necessity of a Christian Logic, (Amsterdam, 1932); Introduction to Philosophy, ed. J. H. Kok and A. Tol (Iowa, 2005).

H. Hart

From: Campbell Campbell-Jack and Gavin J. McGrath (ed.) New Dictionary Of Christian Apologetics (Leicester: Inter Varsity Press, 2006).